The Chubby Challenge

November 13, 2012 | Comment

One of the great things about the Internet is that it allows new ideas to be quickly built and got into the hands of the public without having to spend huge amounts of cash. This has allowed countless number of people to become entrepreneurs even if only in a very small way. And now it is my turn.

For the last few months I have been working on a new project called The Chubby Challenge which is based on something that we used to run when I was working at AppSwing.

Most office workers seem to lead a sedentary lifestyle … Read the rest

pIO – microSD Adapter for Raspberry Pi

November 7, 2012 | 2 comments

The Raspberry Pi is a great little device – cheap enough that it can get into the hands of just about anyone and challenging enough to pique the curiosity of most. As a lifelong software developer and gadget freak I am fascinated with mine. I have decided though that it is pointless (for me) to use it for development as I have some many other outlets for that. I have decided therefore to use it to look at interfacing with hardware and have ordered a breadboard and other bits and pieces to do some simple tests. Nothing more challenging than … Read the rest

Forcing the Upgrade to iOS6

October 21, 2012 | Comment

I have Bento, the Apple produced database app, on both my iMac and my iPad and it is pretty good for what I need – it’s no SQL Server but then it’s not intended for such heavy duty querying. I decided that it would be useful if to also have Bento on my iPhone so that I could update date a database that I often need access to and when I tried to purchase it the message to the left is what I saw.

I haven’t upgrade to iOS 6 yet for a couple of reasons: my iPad is jailbroken… Read the rest

Stopping Office for Mac re-Opening Windows on Launch

October 13, 2012 | Comment

One of the new features of Mac’s latest OSX operating system is the ability to reopen windows when an application is launched. So if you have three documents open in Pages then you shut it down and reopen these same three documents would be opened again. What a drag!  Fortunately you can turn off this functionality very simply from System Preferences – there are more details on this on the Mactip website.

However, surprise, surprise, Microsoft Office for Mac doesn’t follow this convention and even after you have set this option in System Preferences Office still continues to reopen … Read the rest

The HAND Stylus – the perfect stylus?

September 28, 2012 | Comment

I have written previously of my love of styluses. I thought that I had settled on the Kensington Virtuoso, which is a fine stylus, but it suffers from having a fat tip like every other stylus. This makes fine work, such as handwriting almost, but not quite, impossible. I had thought that the answer to this would be the Cregle iPen that uses a dongle plugged into the dock port to allow it to get much better accuracy. Unfortunately it was let down by having awful calibration and a dearth of apps.

Step forward the HAND Stylus (shown left). … Read the rest

Apple’s iPhone 5

September 24, 2012 | Comment

So I have just tried out an iPhone 5 and I can confirm that it is indeed taller, thinner and lighter. There is also new design detailing. Its new anodised back made it feel plasticky to hold partly, I think, because I was expecting to feel that cold, smooth feeling you normally get with metal. Something else that I wasn’t expecting was just how light it felt compared to the iPhone 4S, so much so that it felt insubstantial, almost toy like.

One real surprise was just how readily available it was. Every carrier and the Apple store itself all … Read the rest

How to shoot yourself in the foot

September 20, 2012 | Comment

There has been a lot of publicity in the tech press recently about changes to the terms and conditions around Twitter’s api. The changes have been made to try and strongly encourage developers of Twitter client apps to, well, basically not continue as Twitter would like to see that area as their sole domain.

Echofon, my go-to Twitter app until this morning, has clearly taken this change to heart and hit the self-destruct button early. Since releasing a new iOS version, which was supposed to bring compatibility is the latest version but seems to have had a devastating effect, many … Read the rest

But what if I don’t want to upgrade?

September 19, 2012 | Comment

So at 6pm this evening iOS 6 went live and no doubt plenty of people raced to upgrade. Not me though as I had already decided that there wasn’t anything in it for me. Flyover view in the new Maps app would be fine if I have a helicopter but I am at ground level and find street view useful so Google Maps is a must. Also I have Siri switched off so there is no need to upgrade for that. So all in all there’s not much there for me.

I went to update my apps this evening and … Read the rest